Outdoor Shakespeare

Twelfth Night. Classical Theatre Lab. Kings Road Park, West Hollywood. 8/9/09.

Summer wouldn't be complete without some good, old-fashioned outdoor Shakespeare. While New Yorkers could see a star-studded Twelfth Night in Central Park earlier this season, we here in West Hollywood have our own modest version of the same play. It's a solid production with good spirit and a few really strong performances.

Most notably, the production maintained quite good pacing, managing to keep my attention without feeling rushed and always making sense out of the language. The actors were combatting airplanes and street noise, and occasional bits of dialogue were lost entirely, and yet I didn't ever feel as if I'd missed anything.

Particularly notable in this production were the comic characters, led by Will Badgett as Feste and Michael Matthys as Sir Toby Belch. They were a lot of fun onstage and made more sense out of the comic bits than I generally experience, and I found myself wishing for more songs.

While this production was far from perfect, it's a good, fun outdoor Shakespeare performance, and not bad for the free show down the street from my house. Director Armin Shimerman did a good job forging a solid, faithful production of a fun play in a lovely outdoor setting.

My favorite Twelfth Night is still the 1998 Lincoln Center/PBS version I saw in high school starring Helen Hunt and Kyra Sedgwick (I really wish this were available on DVD!), but this was a nice pleasant afternoon of theater.